“I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ ” said Ms. Ermel, 30, an unemployed lawyer. She then pointed out that another brand of boxed wine, Black Box, was on sale.
“This is just a couple dollars more and you’re going to like it a lot more,” Ms. Ermel recalled telling the woman, who proceeded to return her original choice to the shelf and plop two varieties of Black Box into her cart instead.
It was not, to be sure, the first time Ms. Ermel had sung the praises of the eight-year-old brand, whose eight varieties are sold in three-liter boxes, the equivalent of four 750-milliliter bottles, for about $20.
“I’ve pointed Black Box out to random people shopping for wine, and said, ‘If you’re looking for something different, you should try this,’ ” she said.
Ms. Ermel, it turns out, is an agent who has been tapped by BzzAgent, a 10-year-old Boston company that specializes in word-of-mouth and social-network marketing.
BzzAgent was hired by Black Box last fall, according to a written summary of the campaign, to “generate word-of-mouth to increase awareness” and to “increase trial, advocacy and impact sales.”
Like about 2,000 other volunteers, who are not paid but receive products deeply discounted or free, Ms. Ermel was asked to invite friends to a blind tasting party at her home, and to serve the wine without first mentioning that it had come out of a box (the brand provided carafes for serving). Then, after the revelation, hosts solicited feedback from guests, who in Ms. Ermel’s case numbered 50.
Only four attendees at her gathering had even heard of Black Box before, but she said guests were so impressed that at least 20 subsequently bought the wine. She has bought it about a dozen times in the last year.
She is under no obligation to praise BzzAgent products unless she feels genuinely enthusiastic, and in the couple of instances she has tried products that she thought were duds, she did not recommend them to anyone, Ms. Ermel said.
Now, for another campaign for Black Box, BzzAgent is enlisting 5,000 agents to host wine tastings over the next two months.
“What we’re trying to do is get people away from their preconceptions about box wine,” said Malcolm Faulds, senior vice president for marketing at BzzAgent, which is owned by Dunnhumby.
Unlike HouseParty.com, which as its name makes clear focuses mainly on consumer-hosted parties to sample brands, parties play a role in only about 15 percent of the hundreds of campaigns BzzAgent undertakes annually, Mr. Faulds said.
Rather, most of what BzzAgent does, and a large component of the Black Box campaign, is encouraging participants to engage with friends about brands on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as in face-to-face situations. Those agents regularly account for their online and offline mentions of participating brands on the BzzAgent Web site, enabling the company to inform brands how many consumers saw or heard those mentions.
The company reports having about 850,000 agents at its disposal, allowing it to assemble groups based on factors including interests, income level, age, gender and location.
Wine snobs tend to turn up their noses at wine sold in a box, and not without cause: boxed wine in the United States historically has been marketed to consumers who were interested almost exclusively in a good value and did not care whether their chardonnay had a herbaceous bouquet or complex finish.
But in the last decade, a new crop of boxed brands — including Black Box, a Constellation Wines brand — has aimed to raise the expectations of consumers. The so-called premium boxed wines, which tend to be sold in three-liter boxes, smaller than the more common five-liter boxes, have won over numerous wine reviewers, and are often compared favorably with bottled wine.
“Bottles might be prettier, but boxes are looking increasingly attractive to wine drinkers for one reason: they cost as little as $4 for the equivalent of a standard 750-milliliter bottle,” Consumer Reports wrote in 2009. “Here’s more reason to celebrate: Three boxed chardonnays our experts recently tried are very good.”
The brands were FishEye, Banrock Station and Black Box.
Sales of premium boxed wines like Black Box, those in three-liter sizes that tend to cost $20 or more, rose 19 percent in 2010 from 2009, according to Nielsen. Similarly, sales for Black Box itself rose 18.2 percent in the year ending Sept. 4 from the previous year, according to the SymphonyIRI Group.
Besides the better-than-expected quality and affordability, a selling point for boxed wine is its shelf life. Air oxidizes bottled wine and ruins it within a few days, but boxed wine comes in an airtight plastic bag attached to a spigot, meaning there is little space for air and wine stays fresh for up to four weeks.
Kim Moore, Black Box’s director for marketing, said the brand had not done traditional advertising because consumers might be so certain that boxed wine was inferior that they would dismiss advertising that claimed otherwise. “There’s definitely a stigma of box wine because people think of the value box wine that they drank too much of back in their college days,” she said, referring to the cheaper brands sold in larger boxes. “We say tasting is believing, and just getting people to try our wine gets them to peel back that stigma.”
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